Some relevant/related papers:

#Original paper: Alink, Arjen, Caspar M Schwiedrzik, Axel Kohler, Wolf Singer, and Lars Muckli. Stimulus predictability reduces responses in primary visual cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience 30, no. 8 (February 24, 2010): 2960-2966. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20181593.

#A relevant paper: Alink, A., W. Singer, and L. Muckli. Capture of Auditory Motion by Vision Is Represented by an Activation Shift from Auditory to Visual Motion Cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 28, no. 11 (3, 2008): 2690-2697. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/short/28/11/2690.

# An interesting paper to HN: Alink, Wouter, Valentin Jijkoun, David Ahn, and Maarten De Rijke. Vries. Representing and querying multi-dimensional markup for question answering. (NLPXML-2006): 3--9. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.129.....

You should check out the papers by Renee Baillargeon on testing infants' knowledge of the physical world, they are pretty cool.

Nice, thanks. During the previous summer I tried to study how my very young cousin (1y at the time) perceived the physical world, against the movies ones (yeh, he watched movies :).

Ever tried to catch a ball? in the case you succeeded you "remembered the future" Correct when I am wrong, but this article said nothing other than, we can estimate where an moving object will be in a few seconds. As far as I understood the abstracts of eagleal's linked articles, the describe that by tricking those pattern recognition abilities of our brain we can create optical illusions.

Whoa! I remember trying an experiment a lot like this when I was in high school with a girlfriend that was really into psychology. She would go onto my bookshelf and place a book there that was new or should be unfamiliar to me and then we measured how long it took me to find a different book that was familiar to me. We thought having a new unpredictable book on the shelf slowed down the search. I now think our methods were bogus, but there was undoubtedly something that caused the new book to stand out when I was looking over the bookshelf.

I think that this is a different type of effect.

I'd be interested to see the results of this experiment on people with autism. As I understand their brains process more of the visual stimulus than normal people do.

One thing that comes to mind is that people with autism tend to react negatively to changes of plans, or disruptions of routine. (That may be a longer time-frame effect than we're talking about here, though, and not related.)

This article is paywalled for me. Flagged.

A summary would be nice.

Weird. Here's the article as I see it:

IT'S like remembering the future. Our brain generates predictions of likely visual inputs so it can focus on dealing with the unexpected.

Predictable sights trigger less brain activity than unfamiliar stimuli, bolstering the view that the brain is not merely reactive, but generates predictions based on the recent past. "The brain expects to see things and really just wants to confirm it now and again," says Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, UK.

He and Arjen Alink at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, asked 12 volunteers to focus on a cross on a screen, above and below which bars flashed on and off to create the illusion of movement. To test a predictable stimulus, a third bar would appear in a position timed to fit in with the illusion of smooth movement. For the unpredictable stimulus it would appear out of sync. fMRI scans showed that the unpredictable stimulus increased the activity in parts of the brain which deal with the earliest stages of visual processing (Journal of Neuroscience, vol 30, p 2960).

The finding supports the "Bayesian brain" theory, which sees the brain as making predictions about the world which it updates when new information comes in.

So now I'm curious - is that the full article? That's what I see, too, but I wonder if there's more to the article that is behind a paywall?